Samsung today announced development of its SpinPoint MP1 series of 7200 RPM 2.5" hard drives. The new series provides the industry's highest storage density of 200GB at 7200 RPM on a 2.5" disk base with SATA interface. The drives utilize perpendicular magnetic recording, a serial ATA 3.0 Gbps interface, and feature native command queuing for high performance. To protect the drives from vibration and shock, a rotary vibration controller and an optional digital free-fall sensor have been implemented. The SpinPoint MP1 series will be available in 80GB, 120GB, 160GB, and 200GB capacities in May.

Weren't perpendicular magnetic recording drives supposed to allow up to 10 times as much storage? Then why are they still starting at 80GB? Shouldn't we be seeing at least a four-fold increase, starting at 320GB for the low-end? Am I missing something? Shouldn't the 80GB drive cost a lot less?

Weren't perpendicular magnetic recording drives supposed to allow up to 10 times as much storage? Then why are they still starting at 80GB? Shouldn't we be seeing at least a four-fold increase, starting at 320GB for the low-end? Am I missing something? Shouldn't the 80GB drive cost a lot less?

I would say that 10x goal is for the long term. It's not going to happen over night. That said, the storage capacities have already increased substantially with the slower 4200RPM drives. Now it seems like the 5400RPM and 7200RPM drives are staring to pick up. I wouldn't be surprised to see a few 500GB models early next year._________________1.25GHz Mac Mini / 1.8GHz iMac G5 / 2.0GHz C2D Mac mini (2009)
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I also assumed the 10x goal was long-term, however I'm still puzzled as to where the perpendicular technology is being used. I think we already had at least 100GB or 120GB drives before that technology, so why are they still making 80GB and 120GB drives?

Granted those are 7200RPM, but still, shouldn't perpendicular recording allow faster data throughput for the same RPM when compared to parallel recording? After all, they can read at least 2 times as much data since perpendicular recording means at least 2 bit of data where there only used to be 1 bit. It should, in theory, make a perpendicular drive as least as fast as an old 10800 RPM if it was 5400 RPM. So why are they trying to increase the RPM, those drive should in theory already be faster than 7200RPM parallel drives. Sorry if this is confusing. It's all theory anyway, I'm sure there's performance hits at some places, but I hope you get the idea.

From my point of view, since perpendicular recording can't allow less than a 2x increase in capacity, shouldn't we be seeing 160GB or 200GB drives for the smallest models? Are they starting from 40GB drives or something? Where are the 240GB drives?

In the end I'm wondering if they're not simply using perpendicular recording to reduce the size/number of platters and get more profits.

The less platters, the less noise and heat. A while ago I decided for a Samsung Spinpoint P120, 3.5', 250 gb in my Mini Stack, which is just a bit less noisy than my 200 gb Barracuda and since I use it as bootdisk for my Powerbook which has a 4200 rpm disk which is horribly slow, it is not bad, but still to noisy in an closeby external case. If a new Core2Duo mini arrives and it still has a 60 gb SATA hd, I think one of the first things is, change it for this Spinpoint or maybe one of the Seagate Momentum's, which did a good job in my former mini, though was still to slow.
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